Colt announces the largest enterprise class cloud footprint in Europe

Colt Technology Services, the leading information delivery platform, today announces it is providing enterprises with access to the largest cloud footprint in Europe, enabling CIOs to address regulatory and business requirements for data to reside in specific countries. The service is being offered direct to enterprises and is now available across Europe in datacentres in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland. This enables CIOs to provide a consistent service experience in-country or across Europe, irrespective of where the user is located.

The implementation of Colt’s standardised orchestration layer in these datacentres means that regardless of where the business is located, or where the applications are hosted, customers can access, provision, manage and automate their network, infrastructure and storage via a single intuitive online portal. This simplifies the job of deploying and managing services, whether meeting data protection regulations in multiple countries, or moving from development and test to a production environment without downtime.

Colt is able to offer enterprise customers a wide range of infrastructure services from its 20 datacentres across Europe. Its ability to offer an integrated range of services spanning infrastructure, platform and workloads is a key differentiator. Previously, customers have had the headache of working with separate providers; now with Colt, no matter where they are on their IT services journey they have a choice of services across basic and managed networking, colocation, IaaS, platform management and a secure, fully-managed environment for business and web applications.

In addition to enabling network, server and storage provisioning, Colt’s orchestration layer also links service management to flexible commercial frameworks in a simple-to-use online service request catalogue, accessible from anywhere, via any device. Service levels can be designed to reflect different business priorities and scaled up as required all the way from self-service through to a fully-managed service. Customer support is provided in 15 languages from Colt’s dedicated customer service centres.

“To date, CIOs have faced the choice between public cloud and outsourced IT services,” explains Jon Bennett, VP of Portfolio and Strategy. “But the ability to scale compute resource should not exclude flexible commercial and service levels that allow the CIO to guarantee business outcomes.”

“Our enterprise cloud services are designed to deliver scalable cloud solutions as well as flexible service and commercial levels delivered via our service catalogue. After consulting closely with our customers, it is clear that being able to offer infrastructure, platforms and workloads will give the CIO confidence that they can focus on delivering business objectives, rather than managing technology.”

Bennett continues: “For too long now CIOs have had to battle with the day-to-day challenge of managing operational IT tasks – time that should be spent on delivering services back to the business to increase top-line profit. Through the automation of many of the operational tasks, our service can release the in-house IT team to focus their attention on strategic projects that will drive the business forward.”

Colt’s enterprise class cloud services are delivered using Colt Optimum services which are differentiated by their unique combination of network reach, integrated technology, service management and commercial flexibility. Colt Optimum is the name of the direct-to-enterprise portfolio across IT, Network and Communication Services. These complement Colt Ceano which is designed specifically for Colt’s indirect channel.

About Colt’s Enterprise Services

Colt’s services have been designed to allow customers to easily deploy, manage and maintain the compute, storage and network services that underpin their business applications. Colt has designed a service foundation that allows customers to view all of their resources online, whether virtualised compute in Colt’s datacentres or a physical server located in the customer’s own datacentre. Customers use the same easy to use web-based interface to access the service catalogue, where additional services can be purchased from virtual machines to professional services, based on the individual user profile. This role-based approach allows greater control over user access to existing services and the deployment of additional resources.

About Colt

Colt is the information delivery platform, enabling its customers to deliver, share, and process and store their vital business information. An established leader in delivering integrated computing and network services to major organisations, midsized businesses and wholesale customers, Colt operates a 22-country, 43,000km network that includes metropolitan area networks in 39 major European cities with direct fibre connections into 18,000 buildings and 20 carrier neutral Colt data centres.

In 2010, the Colt Data Centre Services business was launched to deliver innovative high quality data centre solutions at a Colt or customer site. Our Innovative data centres are rapid to deploy, flexible and highly efficient.

In addition to its direct sales capability, Colt has four indirect channels to market; Agent, Franchise, Distributor and Wholesale which includes Carriers, Service Providers, VARs and Voice Resellers. Colt is listed on the London Stock Exchange (COLT).